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“Where are we going?” Joselyn asked as she buckled her seat belt.
Marcus glanced over his shoulder as he backed his car out of the parking space. “Well, there’s still too much melting snow to go up in the mountains for a picnic like we used to, so I figured we’d do another kind of throwback date, especially since we need to end up in Denver anyway.”
Joselyn’s face lit up. “We’re going to Champion Fun Center?”
It had been the right choice. While doing so much business planning over the past two months, they had spent plenty of time alone in quiet places together. The fun center was the opposite of that in every way possible, and it gave their bodies some good exercise instead of just their minds.
After a game of bowling that Joselyn won, eighteen holes of miniature golf that he won, eating snow cones that made their tongues blue, and playing their fifth round—the tiebreaker—at the basketball arcade machine, Joselyn jumped up and down at her win. He gave her a double high-five, and she immediately wound her fingers in his. They brought their entwined hands to their sides, and Joselyn gave him a kiss that turned into a smile almost as quickly as her lips touched his.
“You know what this win means.”
“Joselyn, come on. Let’s be reasonable about this.”
“You agreed to the rules before we started.” She let go of one of his hands and pulled him toward the snack bar.
“The cheese they put on those nachos isn’t even real food! I can make you some queso dip.Really goodqueso dip.”
“Nope. We’re getting the nacho sauce of our youth.”
“I made my queso for my cousin Beth, and she said it was so good that it is now in the top spot on her ‘If I could only have one food for the rest of my life’ list.”
Joselyn stopped, put a hand on her hip, and raised an eyebrow in challenge. He took the moment not to hold out, like he was undecided and needed her to convince him, but to just really look at her. At how beautiful she was with her face flushed from the speed basketball, hairs that had fallen out of her ponytail framing her face. He had seen a million different looks on her over the years— from sleep-deprived to formal, to sick in bed, to business, to working in the yard, and everything in between— and she was breathtaking in all of them. Probably because there was so much goodness inside her that it couldn’t help but spill out.
“Okay.” He finally relented and let her pull him to the snack bar. He’d known he would do anything she asked from the start, but still.
As he sat across from Joselyn at a small round table, smiling and laughing and eating fake cheese that he couldn’t believe he’d ever thought was “liquid gold sent straight from above,” he realized this was why he thought it was okay for them to date and to be business partners. Because when he was with Joselyn, everything felt right in the world.
When he considered her whole family in the equation, the family he had long ago claimed as his own and didn’t think he could ever live without, the waters got so much murkier. Murky enough that it had stopped him from enjoyingthisfor a full decade. Murky enough that it made him question this thing that was so obviously right.
fifteen
JOSELYN
Maybe it had been a mistake for Joselyn to move in with Macie and Marcus to move in with Everett last Saturday. Neither of their leases was up until this Saturday, but they had figured it would be less stressful to get out early. That way, they could have time to fully clean their old apartments over the space of a week instead of rushing to do it on moving day. And they figured it might be easier to be in Nestled Hollow with all the business stuff they needed to do.
They had been wrong. They had both been living in town for a total of five days, and between the nearly two-and-a-half hours it added to both their daily commutes for work, their schedules that were completely different from each other’s, all the cleaning of their old apartments, the unpacking of the new ones, and so many business details to attend to, they were both tired, overworked, and irritable. All the fun they’d been having getting the business together for nearly ten weeks was now gone, replaced completely by stress. The grand opening was in sixteen days, and they weren’t even close to being ready.
Marcus had the day off, so he had spent it at the shop, helping Nate and Sandra to get many of the things there ready. Joselyn had taken off work early so that she could spend an hour in the shop before they headed to their very first Main Street Business Alliance meeting, but the Colorado Avalanche were playing at the Pepsi Center, and traffic was already a nightmare.
By the time she got on I-70 and had relaxed a bit, she got a call from Marcus. She had answered it through her phone’s speakers, so she got to hear nice and loudly that there was a minor mishap at With a Cherry on Top and to make sure she stopped by before the meeting.
She pulled into an empty spot in front of their business more than two hours after she had left work— a trip that normally took her an hour and twenty minutes— and forced herself to take a few slow breaths. The outside of the building looked great. Whatever was wrong on the inside they could fix. Tomorrow was her last day at work, so they would have plenty of time to deal with everything.
She walked inside the building, and her attention was drawn for a small moment to the back counter, which looked less done than it had the last time she had been there. Her eyes only stayed a moment before they were drawn to Marcus, Nate, and Sandra, who seemed to be closing ranks, all with faces full of trepidation.
“What is it?”
Sounds of construction came from the kitchen— hammering and sawing and so much more noise than usual. From fans, maybe? And possibly a generator. Over the top of the half-wall, she could see a handful of heads turn toward her with their own worried looks that only made the churning stomach and tightening chest worsen.
Marcus broke free from the others and walked toward her, arms outstretched like he was going to wrap her in a hug, but she didn’t want to be protected from this. She wanted the whole truth. Now. So she held up a hand. “Tell me.”
“The ice cream machine was delivered today. A full week early, even.” He tried to give an enthusiastic smile, but then his shoulders fell, and he shifted to motion toward the kitchen. “It wasn’t helpful to have it early, because the flooring isn’t down yet back there. One of the delivery men stumbled and fell into the machine just a few feet from getting it into place. You’ve seen how big they are. Anyway, it kind of tipped, hard, since it had his weight adding to it, and, well...”
Marcus trailed off, so Nate finished. “It fell into the wall and broke it. That wouldn’t have been too bad, except that wall has a sink, and it broke water pipes.”
Joselyn’s hands flew to her mouth as she stepped around them to where she could see behind the front counter. The remnants of water flooding the floor was visible now, and she could see where the wall was crashed in. The sink had fallen over and had taken that entire section of cabinets with it.
